Bad Cow (Oræl Rides to War Book 1)

by Andrew Hindle

  “I told them not to worry, though,” he went on, smiling at his friends’ remembered unease, “they’re pretty harmless. Especially to young people in their full health and strength. They stay close to hospitals and nursing homes. A bloke like Little Phil could plant one of them head-first in a wall almost as easily as I could. Vampires don’t go for strong humans.

  “Vampires are powerful, sure, and they’re fast, and they’ve got the brains of a human,” Barry tilted his hand back and forth, “technically.

  But they’re pretty uncoordinated, and they are fairly stupid. At least in comparison to someone who’s healthy and young and paying attention. They pick off the surplus population. They don’t go after the strong. I don’t know why I’m telling you this. Just … trying to explain what I’m trying to save you from becoming, I guess.”

  He sighed, and patted the lid once more. His hand felt heavy. He wondered, even if Angels didn’t sleep, whether they might benefit from just lying down and resting their eyes for a bit.

  He knew he shouldn’t expect much fallout from the Canon thing. Indeed, the less response there was, on a social level, the better. It meant the end of the millennium-old Imago wasn’t bringing the economy of the western world crumbling down, which admittedly he could have thought more about before rushing off to do his Angelic duty. And Canon did have a formidable collection of lawyers and representatives, who were very, very good at getting people to lose interest in his movements. They would have gotten to the police, convinced them that everything was fine even though the apartment had holes blown in the walls and ash-filled clothes strewn around the place.

  “I mean,” he rambled on to Laetitia, “those lesser Vampires of his, they must crop up a lot when Canon’s around. His lawyers would be good at dealing with that sort of trouble. I just wish I could keep a better eye on what’s happening in Sydney. How am I supposed to look after this whole country if it takes me a week to fly from one side to the other and back, and I have to stop-over a couple of times on the way there for half a day at a time, and I’m completely shagged by the time I get back? Gabriel clued me in with the Canon thing, but what about next time?”

  One of the guys – Tommo, Barry thought in a disjointed way – had once asked him what happened when the Vampires made more Vampires and began to outnumber the humans.

  “I told him they won’t – outnumber the humans, that is,” he continued, jumping randomly from topic to topic. It wasn’t as if Laetitia even understood English. Not much, anyway. She’d probably started studying it in school, but that was all over now. “I told him, the ratio of predators to prey is always your classic biomass pyramid. That’s why the human race is so unnatural, and that’s why Vampires are here in the first place. Once the human population is manageable, naturally, the Vampire population will plateau,” Barry slumped slightly. “And that won’t be for thousands of years – if humans or Vampires last that long.”

  Conversations with his friends about this subject always seemed to end up with Barry saying something about surplus population, trying to smile about it, and everybody else nodding and ordering a stronger drink. It was hardly any wonder the Sheepbreezers were drifting away in self-defence.

  Could he bring himself to kill Laetitia? Or let her loose in the sewers to degenerate into one of the wheezing, shuffling Vampires that slept in the dark and drank the blood of those almost as dead as themselves? He had to do one or the other, because that was nature and nature didn’t have to be fair.

  The more he thought about it, the more certain he became that Gabriel had wanted him to kill the tiny creature where she lay in Canon’s penthouse, but Gabriel was gone. Now it was up to Barry to make what he could of the situation.

  In life, Barry Dell had not been the best optimiser of situations. He was not all that keen to find out if death had made an improvement to his management skills.

  DWAMPS

  Tuesday evening found Seam, Tommo, Little Phil and Barry sharing a carton of beer at Little Phil’s house. This marked perhaps the third time the Angel had joined them at ‘the Hedlin manor’, and Seam was beginning to feel normal about his old friend being there again, instead of being dead.

  Barry had seemed so run-down and miserable when Seam had gone to Preston Point Anglican that afternoon, he’d felt obligated to convince him to join them at Phil’s.

  “Mrs. Phil and Litler have gone to Cairns for the week,” he’d said, referring to Phil’s wife and son,11 the former of whom had endless tolerance of the cricket team as long as they stayed a safe distance from her collection of china windmills, the latter of whom thought it was bloody brilliant when members of the cricket team swung him around like an aeroplane in close proximity to his mum’s collection of china windmills. “Look, lock the coffin up and come along,” he’d continued. “You can put it in my car and bring it if you want to, but … you said yourself that she’s probably going to sleep for weeks, right?”

  “Maybe months,” Barry had agreed grudgingly.

  “And if she wakes up, she’s not going to be strong enough to bust out of the thing,” Seam had insisted. “She’s not going to have that superhuman Vampire strength, right?”

  “It just seems cruel,” Barry had said, wilting like a dying fern. “To leave her locked in there … if she wakes up, she’ll be terrified.”

  Still, he hadn’t taken much convincing and he’d begun to liven up once Seam cajoled him into the Holden Premier’s passenger seat and they rolled out onto the highway. He’d brightened still further when Seam had passed him an Emu, frosty and already jammed in one of the half-dozen novelty stubby-holders he had lying around in his car.

  Tommo had decided that he ‘couldn’t be fucked’ going to the Bad Cow or indeed anywhere else that night, especially since their mate Nails had put in a personal appearance at Little Phil’s house and they were now comfortably arranged on couches and armchairs, watching a selection of different television shows depending on which channel Phil hopped to between commercial breaks. Besides, it was a weeknight and nobody much fancied a late night at the Bad Cow when most of them had work in the morning.

  Tommo himself lacked this excuse since he was between jobs, but he opted for solidarity with the gainfully employed since he’d been the leader of the Staying In Phil’s Living Room lobby.

  Things had gotten somewhat heated when Little Phil had accused Tommo’s couldn’t-be-fuckedness of being linked to a spectacularly unsuccessful series of chat-up attempts with passing women at the pub the previous night.

  “You guys … went out last night?” Barry had asked, sounding more weary and hurt than outraged.

  “Ah, just a couple of pints,” Little Phil, probably the only one not rendered uncomfortable, dismissed Barry’s injured look. “Except for Tommo, who had six bourbon and cokes and tried to chat up anyone in the place with tits and a heartbeat.”

  “What,” Barry said, “even you, Cap?” he turned to Tommo. “Bloody Hell, Tommo,” there was laughter, and the mood relaxed once more. Nobody was entirely certain what would happen if the Angel got really upset, if it was even possible anymore. They knew he went Vampire-hunting and came back with skulls, or at least he’d done so once, and frankly once was enough.

  “He’s a gorgeous man,” Tommo said, not looking up from the remote, which he was treating like some sort of arcane puzzle.

  “Would’ve been the only good decision he made last night,” Little Phil said, to continued mirth. “Unfortunately I’m a picky cunt.”

  Barry pushed himself to his feet and swayed slightly. “Who’s up?”

  The Sheepbreezers had found that it was something of a waste of effort and money – which Barry still didn’t really possess12 – to get the Angel drunk. Even when he had been a normal human being, Barry had required a fair few beers to get him to lose control of the volume of his voice. Now, matters were just impossible. Nails could snap between drunkenness and sobriety like he was switching on windscreen wipers, a fact which seemed fundamentally wrong to
the others. Even more wrong, in some ways, was the way the Angel endeavoured to not flick back to sobriety at the least sign of trouble, but exercised his self-control tirelessly in order to remain giggling and slurred.

  Tonight, however, the Angel seemed to be on a mission to forget his woes. Seam couldn’t remember one instance since their arrival at Little Phil’s place where Barry had snapped to sobriety, even for a second. It was almost like having the old Nails back.

  Phil took another beer, and so did Seam. Tommo was still piss-farting around with the remote control, as he had been since the eight-thirty round of movies had started on various channels. It was a bit of a good old U.S. military showcase, with one channel showing Good Morning Vietnam and another Full Metal Jacket. Tommo had already dropped the remote twelve times and didn’t look like stopping anytime soon.

  “So when was this big party?” Barry asked next, opening his own beer and dropping back into the couch. His wings flapped out to either side with a weird slithery thump and Seam was graced with a faceful of feathers. “Fuck,” the Angel muttered, and folded them behind him. This left his shirt in disarray, and he tugged at it listlessly. “Sorry. Yeah. Right. So. Party?”

  The big party had come to the Sheepbreezers’ attention the night before.

  Seam and Little Phil, having developed pronounced leans of their own in the course of the ill-advised Monday session, had begun making subtle remarks towards Tommo, suggesting he make up his mind as to where he wanted to spend the evening before he wound up spending it in hospital. Tommo had been ignoring them with the lofty superiority of a man too drunk to tie his own shoelaces. They’d finally been about to leave when a stunningly attractive young woman had given Tommo her phone number.

  What she’d actually given him was a little gold-edged card with the name and address of a new nightclub and its opening event name on one side, the cryptic non-phone-number numerical sequence 010990-1900 and the far less cryptic Good for One Free Drink (No Spirits) on the other. She’d also been giving them out to everybody else at the pub, but Tommo didn’t let this dampen his enthusiasm and Seam and Phil had eventually been obliged to march him out of the place before the watchful bouncers tossed him face-first.

  Eventually, they’d figured out that Tommo had in fact been given a promotional invitation to a new nightclub in downtown Fremantle over by the prison. The cryptic number was a date and time – the first of September, 1990, seven in the evening – and the card could be exchanged for a drink. This factoid was good for a brief detour as Little Phil and Seam roundly cursed the fact that they hadn’t gotten free drink cards, but the main event had been the other side of the card anyway.

  Tommo, now sitting on Little Phil’s couch and having dropped the remote control for the thirteenth time, duly produced the card and passed it to Barry.

  “Das Wampyr’s,” Barry read, looking near-sightedly at the gold-edged card. “Cool, I mean it should probably be Vampyr’s but check it out, the ‘W’ looks like teeth,” he squinted and read on. “Grand Re-Opening. Parry Street. Theme: Demons and Angels,” his eyes widened, then he peered at the even smaller text. “Attend in costume for free entry before 9pm,” he looked up. “Parry Street, isn’t that the old Night Train club, over by the prison, near the Markets there?”

  “Uh, yeah,” Seam said, blinking. “Yeah, feral central. It’s been dead for years but apparently it just came under new management and they’re re-opening this weekend.”

  “That wasn’t really the important bit about the fucking card, mate,” Little Phil remarked.

  “Oh,” Barry looked at the invitation again. “Oh, right. Das Wampyr’s. That means, like, The Vampire in German or something. Like I said, it should be a V but it sounds like a W and they made it look like teeth. And hey, Tommo gets a free drink.”

  “Fuckin’ damn right I do,” Tommo agreed. “That’s the important bit here.”

  “And we’ve got to dress up as Angels or Demons to get in free,” Barry concluded, and looked puzzled as he handed back the card. “And here’s me without a Demon costume.”

  It was a terrible joke, but they were all drunk so they were prepared to treat it as the funniest thing ever.

  “Another big weekend piss-up then,” Little Phil said, and scowled. “The bouncers at The Night Train were pricks,” he added, “mafia scumbags, the whole lot of them,” he took another mouthful of beer, then jabbed a finger at the others. “Did you know that place used to be a hotel? My mum and granny used to live there, when they first came to Australia in the … shit, the ’40s?”

  “The Night Train used to be Kittykat’s,” Tommo reminisced.

  “Yeah, and before that it was a bunch of other things,” Little Phil insisted. “But before that, it was The Old Town Hotel.”

  “How fuckin’ weird is that though, Nails?” Tommo went on, swivelling in his seat to blink at the Angel. “Vampires, Demons, Angels. Reckon it means anything?”

  Barry now seemed to be paying more attention to the television than to anybody else in the room. “Ha ha,” he said crustily, pointing. “hotter than a snake’s arse in a wagon rut,” he repeated Robin Williams’s latest line, then turned and looked at Tommo with a very convincingly bleary expression on his face. “What?”

  “The party next weekend,” Tommo said testily. “We were just talking about it.”

  “Huh? Oh yeah, right. I haven’t got a Demon costume,” Barry laughed again. The other three chuckled dutifully. “What about it?”

  “I said it’s fuckin’ weird,” Tommo repeated. “Does it mean anything? Maybe somebody knows about you. Maybe there’s another Vampire in the country, moving in on the other dude’s turf. Maybe an actual Demon.”

  “Nah,” Barry said dismissively. “The Night Train was always doing dress-up parties too. I reckon the bouncers just like to have an excuse to boot people out, and ogle girls in sexy Demonette costumes and fluffy wings and halos. None of the other Imago Vampires care about Canon and it was all over in Sydney anyway, Freo’s way off their radar. Let alone the Demons’ radars. No way either of them came to…” he trailed off, yawned, and slumped in his seat. “Doesn’t matter about the skull,” he went on vaguely, “it probably just vaporised in the sun.”

  “Wait – the Vampire skull’s gone?” Seam asked.

  “Yeah, doesn’t matter,” Barry mumbled. “I’m mostly worried about Laetitia. The kid,” he raised a finger, looking momentarily more awake. “Maybe she snuck out and took the skull,” he said. “Carried it back into her coffin like a … a comforting teddy bear.”

  “That’s the creepiest fucking thing I’ve ever heard,” Tommo declared.

  “It’s in my top ten,” Little Phil agreed.

  Barry chortled, and then swore as his wings flopped over again and he spilled his beer.

  Seam had to admit he was a little worried. Barry had never been this consistently shambolic before. Usually he slipped up and did something sober and coordinated. Perhaps they’d really upset him by going out without him the night before. He tried to imagine how isolated the Angel must feel, but his mind shuddered away from it.

  Tommo lurched to his feet. “Well, fuck all this,” he said, “I’m going home. We playing on Thursday, Cap?”

  Little Phil nodded. “Yeah, let’s do a few overs and then hit the field again on Saturday arvo. We can have a quick game, Nails can come and join in after sundown, and then we can have a few drinks. Then we can go and check out the new club, see what it’s like.”

  “See if there are any chicks in sexy Demonette costumes,” Tommo agreed with a grin.

  Seam also stood up. “Right,” he said, and took a quick tally of his beers. He’d only had three in the past two hours, mostly out of respect for the fact that he had to work the next day, and partly out of concern for Barry. “You wanna lift home, Tommo? Or are you gonna call a taxi?”

  “Uh, dunno,” Tommo scratched his backside in contemplation. He had reached the stage in his drunkenness that the Sheepbreezers referred to as his
Blinkey Stage. His eyes would blink slowly, but not at the same time. First one would close, then the other would be dragged with it. Then, at some randomly-allocated time, they would open again. First one, then the other. “I got no money left.”

  “I’ll give you a lift,” Seam volunteered. “I wanna get some food anyway. You too, Nails,” he added, “or are you gonna stay here and, like, fly home?”

  “Ahh, I’m in no state to fly anywhere,” Barry commented. “I’ll come along. You guys need to get to work on your costumes for the weekend,” he laughed.

  Tommo and Barry finished off their beers and left them for Little Phil to clean up – or not, as the far more likely case may be – then Barry followed Tommo’s wobbly figure out to Seam’s car. Without much ceremony, they bade farewell to Little Phil and drove off into the darkness.

  It was close to eleven by the time Seam wound his way from Tommo’s place to Preston Point Anglican. Barry had held to his apparent unspoken pledge of drunkenness with admirable commitment to duty, and was still listing dangerously to one side as he clambered out of the car and wandered up to the main doors of the church.

  “Hey Nails,” Seam called out as the Angel swung the church door open. “Don’t slam your wings in the door.”

  Barry turned, then turned again, looking over his shoulder and looking rather like a dog chasing its tail. He stumbled and almost fell into the side of the doorway. “Fuck.”

  “Are you alright, mate?” Seam asked.